


In the circle

by Ifitbelove



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: Angst, Childhood, F/F, Gen, Stationary, back story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 07:38:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4426904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ifitbelove/pseuds/Ifitbelove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is Joan thinking, as she lays out her yellow pencils? S3E12. I'm a sucker for a back story...</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the circle

Joan Ferguson had always found the smell of pencils reassuring.

She laid the first one down on the desk. The whiff of paint and wood shavings reminded her of her father’s workshop. As a child, she’d taken refuge there. It had no windows, and the air was sharp with cigarette smoke and varnish. Dad had insisted on whispering in there, as if they were in a church, his hands in their work gloves steady against the lathe while he told stories about his father, who’d crafted the world’s finest violins in St Petersburg, supposedly, before the world went to hell. Her job was to pass him the tools and return them to their correct place. 

Which must have made everything take twice as long, she realised, looking back. A sign of the old man’s intermittent kindness, maybe, or just his need for an audience. In spite of her rage at him, she'd give a great deal to be back there now. There were things she'd never asked him. 

***

She placed another pencil on the desk, its end at right angles to the first. Seventeen centimetres long exactly, its circumference a perfect octagon, its painted surfaces gleaming. Flawless, she decided. Like the stationary they handed out on the first day of school: the empty exercise books, the erasers without scuff marks, the crisp paper. Everywhere you looked, a fresh start. 

And Miss Terence, leaning down to bestow a new box of pens, that tiny silver man on his cross swaying above her breasts.

Miss Terence had creamy skin and auburn hair in a glossy French roll, and she could silence a room full of children by raising one eyebrow. She slashed Joan’s knuckles with a ruler for forgetting her school gloves or writing with her left hand – the other kids screamed or snivelled for that, but Joan was already practised at not making a sound. Self-control was what it took, she realised, to win one of Miss Terence’s rare smiles.

Teachers back then were not expected to be social workers. Miss Terence never asked why Joan got wild sometimes, or why she shrank from going out into the playground where chaos reigned. Out there, there were children who laughed at things Joan didn’t understand and made everything noisy and messy and alarming, until she had to hurt them so they would stop being bad. That earned more whacks from Miss Terence, until the teacher began keeping Joan in with her instead to tidy the classroom – a punishment which suited everyone.

Miss Terence’s stockings had seams up the back which could have been drawn on with that ruler of hers, and sometimes she laid her hand on Joan’s shoulder. At seven, Joan decided she would marry Miss Terence. Nearly half a century later she reflected that she could have done worse. 

***

The first four pencils lay like the points of a compass. Joan stroked the one pointing west, fingering its sharp point. It left a black line across her skin. 

As she rubbed it clean, she found herself thinking of Sabina. Sabina had been Joan’s favourite of all the women Dad brought home when she was young. Sabina looked like Marlene Dietrich, and completed the impression by plucking out her eyebrows and drawing them on again. Thin dark swoops like a butterfly’s wings, below her waves of blonde hair. 

Joan, aged ten, had watched from the doorway, admiring the steadiness of Sabina’s wrist, her look of concentration. 

‘Does it hurt?’ Joan glanced at the tweezers. Sabina winked. 

‘You gotta suffer for your art, honey.’ 

Sabina wore kid gloves so tight she could barely close her hands, with predatory heels and furs down to her knees. She smoked thin cigars, summoned passing men to carry her suitcases and hatboxes from the car, and played cards like her life depended on it. 

She told Joan not to worry about having no friends to speak of and no family except Dad. Why, she, Sabina, had been smuggled out of Poland in a suitcase and everyone she’d loved was long gone, but she was still here, wasn’t she? Sabina sprayed Evening in Paris perfume between her breasts, sang Yiddish songs in a gravelly voice, and groaned in relief when Joan rubbed her feet. Those fabulous shoes left painful red grooves in her heels. Joan caught glimpses of other red marks higher up, left by Sabina’s suspender belt, and imagined soothing those ones too.

If Sabina saw anything strange in the girl’s silent, staring company, she never said so. But why would she? Sabina accepted admiration as her due. On the run from landlords, debt collectors and ex-husbands, Sabina lied fluently, always had a backup plan, and treated the world like a film in which she was the star. She made survival seem possible. 

***

The first eight pencils were in place now; the circle was taking shape. Joan paused to admire the colour. Traffic-light yellow, a shade that meant both caution and risk. Signalling a situation that could go either way. 

Most prisoners would have wanted drugs as a present, or smokes, or at least chocolate. Jianna had wanted textbooks, a calculator and pencils. She was going to finish her schooling, she said. There was a kid on the way, and she wanted him to be proud of her.

The young woman gave up smoking yarndi for the same reason, which Joan was relieved about, and cigarettes, which made Joan slightly sad because Jianna’s technique there had been dazzling. When police and social workers talked to her, the prisoner sat slumped with her head down and mumbled ‘yes’ to whatever questions they asked her. But when she wanted attention, Jianna Riley lounged against the wire fence of the exercise yard and smoked like a girl in a magazine – her head thrown back, her cheeks hollowing out, a stream of silvery smoke escaping from her lips. You could see her raspberry lip gloss clinging to the filter. Joan hurried past and tugged at her jacket, and sweated.

Jianna’s vulnerability made Joan shake, but the younger woman wasn’t totally helpless. Jianna talked about getting a job in aged care one day, and a flat near the beach. She traded chocolate bars for baby shampoo, determined that the boy would look spotless when child protection workers came sniffing around. And she set out to track down the mother she’d been removed from when she was two, because she wanted her baby to have a grandmother. Day after day, she stood in line for the phone on her swollen feet, waiting to try the number of another person who might point her in the right direction, while Joan fidgeted nearby and hauled other prisoners out of the queue on fake charges, to shorten the wait. 

Jianna told her not to do that; it was risky. But love makes people arrogant, and Joan couldn’t bring herself to believe that terrible things would happen. Not if she didn’t want them to. 

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know these women.’ That afternoon, Jianna stole a radio from the storeroom and got it playing near her door when Joan, as if by accident, walked by. She remembered the song: ‘Fall at your feet’. 

***

Joan laid out the ninth pencil, then the tenth, her hands moving faster. Frowning, she adjusted them, checked their symmetry, then shifted them again. Still they weren’t quite right. 

Cynthia had been a fellow officer at Blackmoor, and she and Joan had not been friends. Cynthia swore every time she opened her mouth, pushed the inmates around, and had a menagerie of animals tattooed up each burly arm - plus she was rumoured to be on the take. Joan disapproved, more of the rumours than the corruption itself. The woman had no subtlety. 

But the night Jianna died, it was Cynthia who found them together. She was the one who somehow got Joan to let go, and dragged her away from there before anyone else could see and realise everything. Cynthia took Joan home, poured whiskey down her throat, and called work to say Ferguson was sick with flu. Why did she do all that?

Now, Joan paused in her arrangements, gazing down at her desk. There was a gritty sensation between her thumb and forefinger; that black line must still be there. She scrubbed at it until her fingertips glowed red. 

That was the thing about pencils. You could erase their marks, but not completely. 

It was Cynthia who had found Joan on that other occasion too, a few weeks after Jianna’s death. That occasion in the schoolroom.

Thinking back, Joan frowned. Why had she gone in there? The prisoners were at their work stations and the place had seemed empty. 

She shook her head. Her memories of that day were … unreliable. Perhaps she’d heard a noise and gone to check? Yes, probably that was it. She hadn’t followed the prisoner in there on purpose. Had she?

Joan paused, feeling a muscle twitch in her cheek. What was the woman’s name again – Bryant? 

Not that it mattered. It was years ago, and the inmate was only one of them, wasn’t she? One of the scum who stole Jianna’s belongings and called her a slut, and made up lies about her child being neglected so the governor and his tame social worker would have a pretext to do what they’d probably planned all along. Yes, Bryant was one of the ones responsible. Joan was sure of that. Fairly sure. Although by that point, all the inmates had started to look the same to her.

Had Bryant got permission to leave her work station that day? Did she swear when Joan questioned her, and refuse to apologise? Did she snigger when Joan told her she didn’t take any lip from prisoners? 

And had Joan wanted her to snigger? Wanted an excuse for what happened next, after Bryant backed away, her smirk fading? After she backed up against the teacher’s desk with its battered books and graffiti, and its jar full of freshly sharpened pencils?

Cynthia found them, later. Joan wasn’t sure how; prisons weren’t so full of cameras back then. Maybe she’d heard the noises. 

Afterwards, Joan’s memories of that time grew tangled and misshapen. She let them stay like that - what was the use in looking back? But she did recall Cynthia half-carrying Bryant out to medical. Joan heard the guard saying to Bryant in her cheese-grater voice ‘Why’d you wanna do that to yourself, you crazy slag? I just saw you do that, didn’t I? So you’d better not try telling any lies.’ 

Later, Cynthia had hustled Joan out too. 

‘Don’t tell me anything,’ she said. Her hands around the steering wheel were shaking. ‘That’s the last time I cover for you, Ferguson. This can’t happen again.’

‘It won’t,’ Joan promised, which was the truth, more or less. Well, she never used Cynthia as an alibi again. And she never came so close to getting caught.

***

Now, Joan paused, hearing her office door click open. She flexed her knuckles, inspected the backs of her fingers, then turned them over. There seemed to be nothing wrong. 

But her hands had been a mess that day. Skinned raw and bleeding. The weather had been cool, and Cynthia had shoved a coat and a pair of gloves at her before they walked out through reception. 

‘Here. For Christ’s sake, cover those up.’ Joan had felt the scratchy woollen fabric sticking to her open grazes, and knew that peeling the gloves off later would hurt.

***

Now the office door closed again, and Joan went back to her task. The circle was almost complete. 

Somewhere above her, Vera was talking. Words of betrayal, of justification. Joan couldn’t quite piece them together, but it hardly mattered. Her deputy wanted to be challenged, Joan guessed, wanted to be accused of treachery so she could defend the choice she’d made. Vera wanted the spotlight at last, but Joan saw no reason to give it to her. Vera had chosen the company of dullards, hypocrites and professional victims over a good honest monster. She could not expect theatre or spectacle ever again. 

Still, Joan realised she no longer held much anger towards her deputy. When all this was over, what would Vera be left with? Mr Channing? Mr Fletcher? An exercise yard full of whining junkies, any one of whom might have been her attacker during the riot? Not to mention a board who would claim credit for any successes and blame Vera for every failure. That’s if they appointed her governor, of course, but Joan suspected that was unlikely now. No, the board would go for a man next time. Someone who made them feel comfortable. 

The thought caused Joan a twinge of something unfamiliar, something like pity. Poor Vera.

For a moment, she recalled Vera’s face the night they’d had drinks together in Joan’s office. How the younger woman’s expression had softened, those big doe-eyes of hers shining, when Joan said she trusted her. 

Had it all been an act? Perhaps. But still Joan found herself nudging a space in the circle to make room for one last line of defence.

Sitting back, she admired her handiwork. The yellow spikes pointed outwards like the rays of the sun. A sun that was dying, of course, destined to burn itself out of existence – but not yet. 

Joan Ferguson smiled. No, not just yet.


End file.
